by Terry Persun
Blake inspected it. He looked at Bradley.
“I knew that,” Bradley said. “They're like clean-up robots. Sometimes when there's an accident, the virus, that's what we called them, would clear out the apartment. We didn't care if the resident was alive and inside, as long as we didn't have to deal with processing another person. We were overloaded as it was. And the system didn't care either. It would merely flag the event as complete and move to the next problem. And there were plenty of them.”
“The place is falling apart,” Keith said.
“But you can't dump that many people into the outside world at once,” Bradley said again.
“There's another way to integrate them, if you have to,” Philip said.
The other men listened to him explain about creating a family unit. “That doesn't separate them, it incorporates them from the beginning. I suspect that one unit can handle maybe five people coming out.”
Blake looked at Bradley.
It was difficult for Keith to tell who was actually in charge. He sensed that the two men had been working together for a long time even though he had never seen Blake before.
“It could work. We never tried that,” Blake said.
“I don't know,” Bradley said. “What if they want to go back in?” He looked straight at Keith.
“We let them,” Keith said. “We find a way to get the system back into shape, become a part of the overall society and let alone those who want to be there.”
“Chipped?” Bradley asked.
“A decision that we can't make yet,” Philip said.
Bradley shook his head. “I don't know.” He looked up at Keith. “And what about you? They still think you're their savior. I'm not sure what to do with you. You are not like all the others.” He waved a hand at Keith. “We've gone through this. You're the boy with the hole in his forehead.”
“Not any more,” Keith said.
“It's true,” Philip said. “The computers let him go. He's free. They've chosen someone else.”
Bradley squared up to Keith. “You don't see them anymore?”
“Not for a while now. First they started to lie to me. Once that happened, I think I separated from it. I'm not sure it had a choice at the end. At least that's how I feel about it right now,” he said. For a moment, he thought about the apparition of his father. Was that a result of the system interfering? Did the system actually open some sort of gate that let other apparitions through? And, most of all, was the gate closed now? Keith couldn't answer the questions at the moment, but knew that they'd be answered eventually.
“I'm not buying this whole thing yet,” Bradley said. “I hear you, but we've got to consider it. We've got to plan how we're going to handle this.”
“I understand,” Keith said. “And if it matters, I'm sorry all this happened.”
“It doesn't matter. It won't until I decide it does.” Bradley started to walk toward the van, and Blake gave Keith a slow nod.
“Now what?” Keith said.
Bradley wasn't walking away, Keith noticed, he was pacing. At a certain point, Bradley swung around on his heels and came back into the circle. “You give up,” he said pointing directly into Keith's face. “All of you. Until I can decide how much of this is the truth and how much are lies to save your skin.” He continued to glare, then slowly turned toward Philip. “Got that?”
Blake said, “Not like prisoners, just no weapons.”
Bradley shook his head. “Bullshit. We post guards. I don't need any more trouble for now.”
So, Bradley was in charge.
“We'll comply,” Keith said. “Is that good with you?” he asked Philip.
“For now.”
“No funny business,” Bradley said. Then he turned to Blake. “Two days. We'll talk with the others.” As he walked toward the van on the bridge, he yelled back. “I'll send a few men to collect your weapons. And a driver.”
Keith and Philip went back to their van to explain what happened. Several of the others weren't happy with their decision. “We could have taken them,” one of them said. Nonetheless, most agreed that they could not have survived. If nothing else, Philip told them that this would give them time to plan.
“I don't like being guarded, not now that we're finally outside. We need to start our own community,” Lori pleaded.
“He's already done that. We can learn from him, even if only for a short while.” Philip opened a space in the conversation for Keith to add something.
“He's right. We should listen to Philip. We've got to buy some time.” Keith followed Philip's lead because he didn't know what else to do. His senses had become overloaded, and it happened in the last few minutes. The fields, the open sky, the water from the creek, it all overtook him at once. He felt a part of the world and noticed the coolness of the air coming from the creek as it met with the air from the fields. There was a line of separation. Perhaps that was the line between them and Bradley, or the line between the chipped and unchipped, the Newcity residents or the outsiders. What was the world telling him?
He looked for the boy or the angel. But he was alone. Realizing that he sensed a deep hunger in his solar plexus, a hollow, empty feeling.
“They're coming,” Philip said, breaking Keith's trance and bringing him back, in part, to the reality of their capture.
“And they have guns,” Lori said. “I don't like this at all.”
One of the men who approached ordered them to hand over their weapons, and Philip nodded his approval. Several of the people looked to Keith as well, but he yielded to Philip's command.
That didn't stop one of them, the gunman who had helped Keith at Newcity, from backing up and refusing to hand over his weapon. He held his pistol out. “You can't take everything from us. Not that easily.”
One of Bradley's men stepped forward, lifted his pistol, and fired into the gunman's chest.
The gunman buckled forward then fell backward. Several of the others yelled and went to him. “Leave him,” Bradley's man said.
That act answered a lot of questions they may have had. Keith saw that violence still wasn't out of the question, no matter how friendly his conversation was with Bradley and Blake.
Nellie took Keith's arm. Lori stood next to Philip. A few of the others paired up as well. Keith worried for them.
Chapter 25
They didn't go back to Bradley's camp where Keith had been taken originally. Instead they took a few back roads and stopped beside a huge barn. Bradley and his crew must have used the barn for shelter before, because it was much cleaner than the barn Keith and the others had accidentally run across the day before.
The whitewashed building had a corrugated metal roof with large areas of rust that randomly spread across it. The barn looked as though it had been built once and then added onto several times. Wood-framed protrusions jutted out on both sides. From the inside, the beams were as thick as a man, and as tall as most of the trees in the area.
All the vehicles were left outside. The fourteen people from Newcity were forced into one of the side areas that had been added to the original barn. The space was loaded with crates and boxes along one of the walls, and piles of bags along the back wall.
Keith walked over to the bags and saw that many of them were seed bags. The crates were unmarked, but he had the feeling that they held more seed bags and had not been opened yet. So, the barn was being used as storage.
In a short while, they were brought small amounts of food, enough to settle their stomachs. A few minutes after they finished two men came and took Philip away. Lori protested but was shoved aggressively and threatened. She ran to Keith and Nellie. “Do something,” she pleaded.
“They're going to question him,” Keith said. “As long as we don't fight them, I think we'll be okay.”
“Like Mike back at the bridge?” she said, referring to the man who had been shot.
“He pointed a gun at them. We did the same thing. We killed one of their men from the van, re
member?”
“To escape,” she retorted.
“I didn't say it was right, but what good will it do if we resist them while we're trapped in here? Let's get clear on one thing, shall we? We're the prisoners at the moment. Our rights are limited. We'll know more when Philip returns.” Keith tried to look strong and confident, and perhaps Lori recognized his weak attempt, but she didn't question him.
She grinned briefly. “We'll see,” she said before walking away from them toward the rear of their holding area.
Philip was gone about an hour. When he returned to the area where they were kept, he appeared in a better mood. “That wasn't so bad,” he said. He addressed Keith, “They asked a lot of questions, many of which I didn't know the answers to. But it seems like they're just after the truth.”
“Whose truth?” Lori said coming to his side.
“What if there isn't a true answer?” Keith asked. “What if we're all just guessing?”
“There is no guessing about who I am or what I did while inside Newcity. I knew the answers and I told them. The things I didn't know, I told them that too. Don't make this more complicated than it is. It's simple.” Philip hugged Lori and gave her a kiss before he addressed Keith again. “And you're next.”
Keith and Nellie looked at the doorway together. Guards with rifles stood to either side and were looking in at them.
“When?” Keith said.
“They're probably talking things over first,” Philip said.
Nellie asked, “Why didn't they talk with Keith first?”
“Base line,” Lori said. “They needed something to start with.”
“How do you know?” Nellie said.
“We're not idiots. We were recruited, years ago. If we had known what they were about to do to us…”
“Do you think that would change a lot of people's minds?” Nellie asked.
Philip said, “Frankly, no.”
The two men who had brought Philip back walked into the area. Keith knew they were after him and gave Nellie a quick peck on the cheek. He had become very fond of her and she appeared to feel the same for him. The kiss was the natural thing to do, automatic. He left with the two men, one on either side of him, but neither one touching him, very respectful, an interesting turn of events.
The main barn space had been equipped with chairs, and tables filled with food, as well as all the people who had come with Bradley. Keith noticed that Ben was back with them, one wrist splinted and bandaged. He was sitting next to a woman, and looked up only long enough to see Keith pass by, then went back to a conversation he was having.
Keith and the two guards entered another of the barn's added-on rooms, located on the opposite side from where the escapees were being kept.
“You set up quickly,” Keith said to Bradley and Blake, who were seated on one side of a table. The guards waited until Keith sat opposite the two men, then they left the area. Keith watched them go before turning back to the others. “I'm really sorry about Rene,” he said. “It was never my intention…”
“I know,” Bradley said. “Philip told me what you said to her. She should have listened to you.”
“What do you mean?”
Blake leaned forward. “The blast never went through the computer center wall. She must have crawled back through and waited in the main lab.” He hesitated. “She was found near the entrance.”
Keith shook his head. He couldn't bring himself to say anything else.
“We have to know what went on, from the beginning. Everything,” Blake said.
“I can only tell you what happened. Bradley knows most of it already.”
“Then bring me up to speed,” Blake said.
Keith did as he was asked, using a shorter version of the conversation he and Bradley had a few days prior. At the end of his explanation, he asked, “What are you going to do with us? Especially them. They've done nothing wrong.”
Blake looked at Bradley for a moment, then back at Keith. “Honestly? We don't know yet. We haven't decided.” Blake returned to the questioning. “Can you tell us, in your understanding, what's going on with Newcity?”
Keith shrugged. “I've told you everything I could think of. You probably know more than I do. You were in contact with Rene. And the only additional information I have is what Rene explained to me. But I didn't experience any of that.”
Bradley leaned forward so far that Keith thought he was going to stand up. He reached out and knocked his fist against the table. “You were part of the machine. You probably still are. You told us that out there on the bridge. You must have a sense of what's wrong, of what's happening.”
“I told you. The only sense I got was that it was bored and wanted a broader experience.” Keith cowered slightly, afraid that Bradley might thrash out at him.
“I still think that it became omniscient,” Blake said, “at least in its own world.”
“Like God,” Bradley said. “You think this room full of computers became God? Well I don't buy it.”
“The hologram,” Keith said.
“What about it? Philip mentioned it too,” Bradley said. “What did you see?”
“Everyone at once. The people in the hologram went on forever.” Keith cocked his head and said, “Like you said, it could be that it believed it was the universe.”
“Belief is a human sensibility,” Bradley said.
“Not if the machinery is God,” Keith said. “But we're not totally under its control, not even with the chips. I know because I've been chipped, more than once.” He wanted to get up and pace, to move so that he could think, but they'd stop him and he knew it. He fidgeted in his seat. “Let's think of it as a society unto itself then.”
“Go on,” Blake said.
While speaking, Keith leaned against the table, then leaned back, reached out and tapped the table with his fingers. “As long as it's able to control the emotions of those inside, it feels safe. As a leader, it provides all the necessary items needed for survival, then goes beyond that and supplies enough to reduce the want for change. Isn't that what Newcity was about from the beginning? The people are given everything and want for nothing. Cheap labor. Cheaper and easier to maintain than robots. Freedom is limited, but the people don't care because they have food and shelter and games and technology. Who needs actual freedom if you don't feel deprived in any way?”
Blake sat forward in his chair. He glanced back at Bradley whose jaw muscles tightened as he clenched his teeth. “Perfect for people with the right personality. Those who are comfortable to follow.”
“Sleepers,” Keith said.
“But that's not good enough for an evolved, evolving, entity,” Blake said.
“So it lets some of us escape…on purpose.” Keith shook his head. “But why? Why isn't it happy to be in control?”
“We may never know,” Blake said.
Bradley couldn't hold back any longer. He stood quickly. His chair fell over, making a dull thud as it hit the dirt that covered the barn floor. “This is insane,” he said. “Computers don't think, they don't believe, and they don't become unhappy.”
“Prove it,” Keith said.
Bradley spun around and glared at him, leaning on the table, his arm muscles tight, ready to strike out. “What did you say?”
“I said prove it. You and Rene studied the people. You were part of the system, too, in many ways. Now go back in there and analyze the computer, the hologram. It answered my questions. Put it straight if that's what you have to do. In fact, put it back so that it's a part of the society instead of a leech. Return us to a balanced state.” Keith let Bradley stew. When Bradley appeared to relax, as though he was thinking about the proposal, Keith said, “You may be the only person capable of setting this straight.”
“And what about you?”
“I'll leave. You don't need me. I'm not useful to you. There's a new boy with a bullet hole in his forehead. Find him.” Keith looked at Blake for help, seemingly the more open-minded of the tw
o.
“The image,” Blake said, “is because the system isn't perfect either. It can't, for some strange reason, create something perfect because it's not perfect.”
“It can only create in our image,” Keith said.
Bradley rubbed his face with his hands. “We might have to break it down to rebuild it.”
“Just don't shut it down completely,” Blake said. “We're talking about a touchy operation.”
“We could pull residents in groups as large as we can handle until the system isn't overloaded. Maybe that's all it would take.” Bradley looked as though he shifted gears mentally. He began to plan how he would attack this bigger problem. He put a hand on Blake's shoulder.
